There are 2 types of random generators in Java: pseudorandom and secure. Pseudorandom generators are transforming a seed into a new portion of pseudorandom data based on some formula. Secure random generators are using some machine specific sources of actually random events (file/socket access, for example) to generate its data.
Secure random generators:
- should be used only when cryptographically strong random data is required
- are slow
- could be waiting for external events (“stuck”) if you have requested a lot of random data (Linux
/dev/randomis an example of such generator)
Pseudorandom generators, on the other hand, depend only on the initial “seed” value, so you can generate the same sequence of pseudorandom events if you will provide the same seed to the algorithm. In general case, such generators are fast because they are CPU bound only (do not rely on any IO). We will review the evolution of pseudorandom generators in Java and the reasons behind these changes.
java.util.Random
java.util.Random is available from Java 1.0. It is a thread safe class, so you may share (in theory) instances of this class between several threads and do not expect to get the same random data in 2 threads at the same time. Such thread safety is achieved via using an AtomicLong for the generator seed.
Random uses AtomicLong CAS (compare-and-set) operations for updating its seed. Despite being a light non-blocking primitive used in a lot of non-blocking algorithms, CAS behaves really poorly under the high contention. Wait for test results to see how poorly it behaves.
Read full article from java.util.Random and java.util.concurrent.ThreadLocalRandom in multithreaded environments - Java Performance Tuning Guide
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